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Friday, October 19, 2012

My biggest issue with Linux

Do not get me wrong, I love Linux, and I have found a way to get to use basically any program I want to use from Windows on Linux. But for a cruncher, whose biggest work horse, non GPU processor is located in a laptop with serious heat issues, Linux has one big flaw. That flaw is its lack of tools to be able to effectively manage heat.

When I ran windows I relied heavily on a TThrottle program which would automatically throttle down your cpu if the temperature exceeded a certain pre-set amount. It worked wonderfully, and if I was ever doing something that caused the computer to run extremely laggy, I knew I had to suspend boinc to get through what I was doing. Otherwise there were little to no problems.

Somehow the Linux community feels no need to develop such a tool, even doing googling for such a piece of software leads to more people talking about it being a hardware error, or poor computer design. But then again, if its happening under normal use, it likely is one of those errors. But so few people think about the heat BOINC generates, because so few people crunch boinc, and next to none of them do so on laptops.

It also occurs to me that another reason why they would never think about such a program is that they care so much about performance, that they do not realize that even when you machine is constantly under a mild cpu throttle, for most things that people do on their computers, with the exception of viewing videos for machines with integrated graphics, you see next to no noticeable side effects. But a pure machine performance purist would consider the fact that for that one program start up, which would have spiked the temp higher than your settings, that it is actually slowed down by fractions of a second.

This makes my biggest issue the fact that even with everything I am trying to do to keep the temp down on my machine, even taking it apart and cleaning out the dust a few months ago, I still face somewhat regular heat issues, on this laptop, which I honestly think was giving too much CPU for the design, as it does a horrible job getting the heat out of the plastic case. While my old laptop the base would feel like a stove top that has been turned on, but it never over heated once, because all the heat found its way out of the case in a hurry.